Marion Bartoli looks like she's a cross between a man and an ape", "Female tennis is useless. I've never seen a useless champion like Bartoli", "I wanted Lisicki to win because Bartoli is ugly...", "Someone as ugly and unattractive as Bartoli doesn't deserve to win", "I'll be supporting the more f***able Lisicki"... these are just some of the tweets by people on the day Marion Bartoli (France) was to fight Sabine Lisicki ( Germany) for the Grand Slam of Grand Slams, the Wimbledon championship. If this wasn't enough, here's something to make you recoil: "Do you think Bartoli's dad told her when she was little, 'you're never going to be a looker, you'll never be a Sharapova, so you have to be scrappy and fight?'" (sic) One would have thought the virtual space has far more tolerance for lowlifes who, under the cloak of anonymity, display a kind of viciousness that would raise a storm in the real world. Apparently not. For this was uttered by the venerable BBC's Radio Five commentator, John Inverdale, right after the world saw an awestruck 28-year-old throw away her racquet in disbelief, realising she had just won the Wimbledon championship! Our world is not a stranger to incidents of cyber bullying and verbal violence. However, the frequency of such cases in the r e - cent past (see box below) and the audacious nature of these tweets and comments forces us to wonder whether we were always a loutish lot, or has something changed in the recent past for people to take such licence with their freedom of speech.

Threshold of decency, obliterated

Says social commentator Santosh Desai, "The threshold that demarcates what's permissible to say and what's not is being obliterated more and more in today's world. There's no system of checks and balances in the virtual space. Young people grow up thinking if they can behave in an obnoxious way on a social platform and get away with it, they can also do it in the real world. The fact that one finds more people on the social media, who are willing to be as crude or more, only emboldens their resolve to take more liberties with what they consider their 'freedom of speech'."

Deep-rooted misogyny

Adman and social commentator Suhel Seth believes the rise of such incidences, Bartoli's verbal bullying and Nigella Lawson's physical abuse by her husband Charles Saatchi, are the perfect indicators of the misogynistic world we live in. He says, "Women have progressed to be at the top of their fields, but male chauvinists have found it hard to accept and handle it. Incidences such as these need to be condemned and publicly shamed. I'm surprised BBC hasn't sacked Inverdale. Every time something like this happens, the person gets away with a slap on the wrist."

Culture of cruelty

However, to pin the blame on just a few people with no sense of decency, would probably be a simplistic way of looking at this problem. Don't we all enjoy reality shows on TV, where everyone is putting the other down by the nastiest of comments and behaviour, even as the TRPs rise? Psychologist Varkha Chulani says we live in a very scary world. "We are all regressing to the culture of barbarism that existed before civilisation. In an increasingly hostile, over-competitive, dog-eat-dog world, people feel emasculated, with no means or ways to feel good about themselves. Nothing gives them happiness. The next best thing is to make others unhappy, to put someone else down so that they feel superior. The last decade, especially, has seen people getting comfortable with their 15 minutes (or even seconds) of fame by any means — infamy, notoriety, rudeness, verbal abuse or bullying," she says.

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Opinions aren't facts

Psychologist Deepak Kashyap believes a better way to fight bullies would be to understand one simple point: "It's time we all told ourselves that I'm just not going to accept your opinions as facts. You have the right to say them. And I have the right to reject them." Kashyap gives his understanding of why people make rude, derogatory remarks. "People love to feel good about themselves by virtue of association. You can't change it. It's human nature. For instance, why do you think we love gossiping? Because by saying, 'arre, uska beta aisa hai', we think our lives are so much better than that other person we are talking about. Schadenfreude (enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others) works like a magic pill making people believe their lives are better and they are superior.

The spurt of such incidents has also in a way worked in favour of the ones at the receiving end of the bullying. Tumblr publicly named and shamed the bullies who trolled about Bartoli. After receiving 674 complaints on a single day, BBC — however mildly — rapped Inverdale and asked him to apologise. The channel also formerly announced that "his (Inverdale's) comments were wrong".

Model and psychologist Anjhula Mya Singh Bais sees cut-throat competition in the tough world of glamour. She says how she believes one should look at this problem. She says, "Buddhism teaches one thing - every human being has a good side and a bad side. If we accept this basic truth about human nature, we'll be able to deal with whatever is thrown our way."

Bartoli probably had learnt this lesson early in life. Because this is what her answer was to Inverdale: "Have I dreamt about having a model contract? No. I'm sorry. But have I dreamed about winning Wimbledon? Absolutely, yes." (sic)

HOW TO FIGHT BULLYING

Recognise the fact that there are a lot of unhappy people in this world who will say hurtful things to others to feel good about their own miserable lives.

You have to be the bigger person to deal with the big, bad, bitter world. Your attitude should be: "You are entitled to your opinion and I'm entitled not to grant them any importance".

It's every parent's and educator's duty to teach their kids about the 5Rs. The 3Rs are Reading, Writing and Arithmetic. What you need to add are Relationship and Resilience. Relationships are about knowing how to build interpersonal skills, what to expect and what not to expect, help kids deal with disappointments; Resilience is about building the emotional quotient so that children grow up to be confident individuals. — Deepak Kashyap, psychologist, life-skills trainer